The legacy of Franco Forty years after his death, Spain still struggles with a dictator.

The legacy of Franco

Forty years after his death, Spain still struggles with a dictator.

By GUY HEDGECOE

El Valle de los Caidos (the Valley of the Fallen), above, is a massive monument to Franco north of Madrid | Agence France-Presse VIA GETTY

MADRID — A few years ago, the artist Eugenio Merino put Francisco Franco in a Coca-Cola refrigerator. It wasn’t really Franco, of course, but a life-sized, silicon sculpture of the former Spanish dictator, which Merino titled “Always Franco.” The work, Merino says, shows how the former leader is frozen in Spaniards’ consciousness and “still present in Spain. How is he present? He’s present in our politics, he’s present in our historical memory.”

Franco turned out to be more present than even Merino had bargained for.


The day after the work went on display in a major Madrid art show in early 2012, the National Francisco Franco Foundation (FNFF), an organization which seeks to keep the dictator’s memory alive, announced it would present a lawsuit, demanding €18,000 in damages from Merino for “caricaturing the former head of state, constituting a provocation in every way.” The chairman of the venue where the art show was being held appeared to agree and Merino was barred from showing his work there the following year. Meanwhile, the court case dragged on.

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November 20 marks exactly 40 years since Franco died in bed. During that time, Spain has transformed itself into a dynamic, modern nation, but its former caudillo has remained a provocative figure whose legacy continues to divide Spaniards and confound their leaders.

Merino and many other Spaniards regard him as a murderous fascist who is comparable to Hitler or Mussolini. He did, after all, lead the 1936 rebellion against a leftist republican government, unleashing three years of civil war, before governing for 36 years with a repressive right-wing ideology known as National Catholicism. Franco’s British biographer, Paul Preston, estimates that the dictator was responsible for the cold-blooded killings of upwards of 150,000 people, who were then buried in unmarked graves, during the war and in the years that followed.

And yet, his supporters see him as a hero.

“You could compare Franco to De Gaulle, or to Churchill — Churchill before World War II, that is,” says Jaime Alonso, vice president of the FNFF. “You could compare him to Napoleon, without a shadow of a doubt. You could compare him to Cromwell in England, and to Kemal Atatürk in Istanbul — all those who have created a nation and who prevented that nation from being destroyed.”

Alonso is talking in the headquarters of the FNFF, in Madrid’s Chamartín district. Nearby, history books are laid out on a table, most of them bearing titles that glorify Franco. But there are also other reminders of the former dictator: wall tiles, t-shirts and coffee cups are all on show and for sale, each bearing the black eagle symbol of the Franco regime. There’s even a mobile phone holster with the emblem. This place is a tiny Francoist theme park.

It’s disconcerting talking to Alonso, because he flatly contradicts so many mainstream assumptions about the civil war and its victor. He denies that Franco was a coup-monger who overthrew a democratic government. Instead, Alonso says half of Spain had been gripped by Stalinism and the right-wing rebels were merely seeking to restore order, as well as “Christian, Western” values. The decades that followed the war, he continues, were not the dark years of poverty and ostracism that are so often portrayed as the Franco era, they were a period of national glory and economic development. The outlawing of political parties, he points out, prevented the kind of petty bickering between politicians that we see today.

Alonso seems to be genuinely hurt by Eugenio Merino’s irreverent artwork. But he’s also affronted by the fact that so many Spaniards have a negative view of Franco. “They want history to be different to how it happened,” he says, unable to hide his exasperation.

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After Franco’s death, the machinery of democracy cranked swiftly into motion. The dictator had groomed the young Prince Juan Carlos to continue his style of autocratic rule after his death. But instead of obeying his mentor, the new monarch set about creating a parliamentary system that included the legalization of political parties and a new constitution, approved in 1978 by referendum.


Those years of accelerated political and social change became known as la Transición and they were lauded around the world for showing how a country could emerge from dictatorial rule and transform itself into a modern state in a consensual and relatively peaceful way.

Much of the praise was due to the fact that moderates from the Franco regime and from the previously outlawed opposition on the left were able to sit down and talk about the future in a mature way. The priority was Spain, rather than party political interests or personal vanity.

Eugenio Merino poses with ‘Frozen Franco’ in 2012

For this extraordinary, improvised transition to be a success, there had to be ground rules. The biggest of all was that the past was off limits. An amnesty law was introduced, initially aimed at protecting former outlaws on the left, though it would later shield former members of the Franco regime from prosecution for human rights abuses. This decision to leave the past in the past became known as el pacto del olvido, the pact of forgetting. That was not entirely accurate: The past was not forgotten, but agreement did exist among the main political powers not to use it as a weapon.

For those like Merino, that meant sweeping the collusion, repression and outright violence of Spain’s recent past under the carpet.

“The issue of Franco and the issue of the amnesty and all the rest of it, none of that has been resolved,” he says. “So it bothers me a lot that people don’t get that. Maybe we need to talk more about Franco and therefore knock the whole thing on the head and move on, instead of spending the next 100 years talking about him.”

The biggest reminder of Franco is his resting place, 35 miles north of Madrid. El Valle de los Caídos, the Valley of the Fallen, is situated on a hillside overlooking a wooded valley. Built at Franco’s behest by republican prisoners between 1940 and 1959, it is a massive monument to the dictator’s National Catholicism ideology. A 150-meter stone cross — the tallest in the world — towers above a large esplanade adorned with the eagle insignia of the regime. In the center of the esplanade is the entrance to a narrow, 260-meter-long basilica, drilled into the mountain. At the end of it lie the tombs of both Franco and José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the leader of the falangist fascist party who was killed by republicans in 1936.

On a winter morning I got talking to a woman in her mid-fifties outside the basilica who came as often as she could to visit the tomb of the man she called, slightly disconcertingly, “grandfather.”

“I like coming here, it makes me feel peaceful,” she said, smiling as she looked out across the valley and toward the snow-capped Sierra de Guadarrama beyond. And then, without a hint of embarrassment: “I love this place — I’ve always been pro-Franco.”

Out-and-out Franco admirers like this woman are a relatively small minority. “We lived better under Franco” is a phrase that, while rarely heard now, was more common in the years following the dictator’s death. The person saying it would invariably be referring not to the killing of republicans and social straitjacket of the time, but to the economic and, perhaps, political stability that period represented.

In defending the regime, Franco’s apologists can point to the fact that the republicans also committed atrocities during the civil war, killing an estimated 50,000 civilians.

And yet others have a very different reaction to this monument to Franco. “You can tell that it’s been built by a dictator — you can tell that it’s fascist,” a young German man said to me after studying the monument. “It’s weird that they still hold Mass here and people still come here and pray.”

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Many people, like this German, get the impression that Spain simply hasn’t tried to get to grips with its recent past. But that’s not altogether true.

In 2007, the reformist Socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero approved a Historical Memory Law which sought to remove physical vestiges of the Franco regime, such as street names and statues, declared illegitimate the military tribunals that had sentenced people to prison or death during the Franco years, and backed state funding for the exhumation of victims of the dictatorship buried in unmarked graves. Beyond these specific aims, there was a broader, more abstract, reach to the law, which claimed to offer “moral reparation” to Franco’s victims.

In retrospect, the Historical Memory Law was doomed from the start. Many on the left dismissed it as far too weak, while the right attacked it for opening up old wounds. A number of statues of Franco were removed from squares across the country, as were many other symbols of his regime. But the law’s impotence was reflected by the fact that elsewhere, street signs dedicated to the caudillo and his murderous generals remained.

“The idea was that we had to finish with this tragic past in Spain,” José Álvarez Junco, a historian who helped the government draw up part of the law, told me. “In the end it was almost the opposite.”

The Historical Memory Law aside, neither of the two parties that have dominated the country’s politics for three decades, the Popular Party (PP) — founded by former members of the Franco regime — and the Socialists, has committed itself to a meaningful exploration or resolution of the Franco years. When a well-known judge, Baltasar Garzón, announced in 2008 that he would investigate human rights crimes from the civil war and dictatorship era, he faced opposition not just from far-right organizations, but also fellow magistrates on the left and right. In the face of such resistance, his probe came to nothing.

Arguably, the stability of Spanish democracy once depended on such a refusal to look back. But more recently that claim has melted away with Spain’s consolidation as a modern democracy and member of the European Union and NATO.

It’s hard to escape the feeling that digging up the past would implicitly mean acknowledging the weaknesses of the Transición, that process which Spain’s traditional political class looks back on with such fondness and no little self-satisfaction.

Questioning the decision not to investigate human rights violations and the brutality of that time also means questioning the sacred status of the Transición. Few Spaniards in positions of authority have been prepared to do so.

In 2011, a committee of experts commissioned by the then-Socialist government recommended that Franco’s body be removed from its mausoleum and buried somewhere less tendentious. But within days the conservative PP had taken power and that report has remained untouched ever since.

“Moving Franco’s body away from the Valley of the Fallen would be quite simple,” says Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), an organization which locates and exhumes Franco’s victims. “But it would be like removing one of the pillars from the Transición.”

Also in 2011, the PP administration withdrew state funding from the ARMH, citing economic constraints.

However, one effort to bring Spain’s dark past into the open has been successful. Eugenio Merino eventually won his legal battle with the FNFF over his “Always Franco” artwork. The judge ruled that his sculpture was “ironic and humorous,” rather than offensive.

“What really gets to me is that people say to me: ‘What? Not Franco again!’” Merino says, of his history-based art projects.

“What do they mean, ‘Franco again?’ It’s as if, when you talk about Franco you’re delving into the past. But you’re not, you’re talking about the present.”

Guy Hedgecoe is a Madrid-based journalist and author of “Freezing Franco: The Battle for Spain’s Memory.”